How to set up Drive Rotation / Swapping (RDX or External USB drives)

Modified on: Fri, 22 Mar, 2019 at 11:59 AM

With Altaro VM Backup, you can set up drive rotation/swapping as your offsite copy location. To do so, please follow the steps below:

Before you proceed, ensure you have one fixed drive/location configured as your Local or Onsite backup location. This should be a location that remains connected at all times (separate to the set of rotated drives you will be using for your offsite location)

Open the Altaro VM Backup console and go to [Setup] > [Backup Locations]

Click [Add Offsite Location]

Choose the [Drive Rotation/Swap] option and click [Next]

Then click on the [Add Physical or Network Drive to Rotation]

Choose to add a [Physical Drive] or [Network Path] to your rotation, then click [Next]

For a Physical drive (select this for RDX cartridges), just select the Drive letter and the subfolder (optional) you wish to addFor a Network share, enter the UNC path and credentials

Then click [Add]

Repeat 5 and 6 in order to add further drives to the rotation set

Once drives have been added, you can use the Up/Down arrows to adjust the priority of your drives in the rotation as shown below (The drive with the highest priority that is currently connected will be used as the active Offsite Location)

Click [Finish] and you will see the rotation set added as an offsite location as shown below. To add or remove further drives to the rotation set you can click the Edit (pencil) icon.

Lastly, select the VMs you wish to assign to this rotation and Drag and Drop them from the VM list on the left into the newly created Drive Rotation, then click [Save Changes] to complete.

Once done, either start an Offsite Copy manually from the [Offsite Copies] menu, or wait for your next Scheduled Offsite Copy job.